Walls are no match for Disney’s mobile rolling robot, the VertiGo. So, how does this bot defy gravity?

It wasn’t easy. A key problem Disney’s ETH Zurich researchers ran into was maximizing the ratio between thrust output and vehicle weight. The team was able to solve this problem by using carbon fiber — a super light and super strong material — and 3D printed parts. These materials combined with two tiltable propellers helped the VertiGo robot “stick” to walls by thrusting it against a surface. The downward force generated from these propellers is enough to support the vehicle driving on a vertical wall and “theoretically even on the ceiling,” the researchers say.

OK this is mad!

8k video!

http://www.engadget.com/2016/01/02/lg-8k-tv/

Forget all the hype about 4K at CES last year -- this year's trend is 8K. LG has revealed some of the first details about its 2016 TV lineup, and the highlight is its first production-grade 8K model, the UH9800. The Korean tech giant isn't saying much about what this 98-inch monster will offer or when it ships, but it's safe to say that this won't be an impulse purchase when Sharp's 8K screen costs about $130,000.

4K format was named because it has 4000 pixels horizontal resolution approximately. Meanwhile, standard 1080p and 720p resolutions were named because of its vertical resolution. The new standard renders more than four times higher image definition than 1080p resolutions for example.

Interesting to get a glimpse at what makes Slack work from a programming view and why!

Slack’s rocket ship has a new co-pilot. April Underwood, Slack’s former head of platform who just launched its App Directory and Slack Fund, has leveled up to become the startup’s VP of Product. Underwood joined Slack in June after nearly five years at Twitter where she was a Director of Product.

Putting the head of platform in charge of the entire product shows Slack’s commitment to making outside developers core to the workplace chat app‘s experience. With Underwood’s guidance, Slack’s product could seamlessly expand to handle the niche needs of any business.

While Slack’s competitors might be able to clone its basic functionality, they’ll have a tough time mirroring the ecosystem of developers drawn by Slack’s remarkable momentum, buzz, and $80 million dev fund.

Parents, let this be a lesson: Don’t leave your child unattended with your iPad. Seven-year-old Faisall Shugaa apparently decided to get himself an early Christmas present in the form of Dino Bucks, which in addition to being an in-game currency of Jurassic World, are also linked to, you know, real money. The grand total? A whopping $5,000, all of which was spent between December 13 and 18. Needless to say, Faisall’s father, Mohamed Shugaa, is none too pleased about the charges.

As it turns out, the youngster memorized his father’s Apple ID and password, which allowed him to make purchases, mostly to upgrade the dinosaurs available in the video game. In a six-day period, Faisall managed to make an impressive 65 transactions, at one point spending some $2,000 over the course of a single hour.

You've probably heard of wearable cameras from companies like Narrative, which clip onto your clothing and log images of your daily life. The upcoming MyMe from Orcam takes that idea to a whole new, and potentially even more useful, level. Instead of simply recording images, it uses artificial intelligence to respond to audio and visual information in real-time. MyMe consists of a camera that clips onto your clothes and a Bluetooth earpiece for relaying information. It could potentially do things like generate profiles of people you meet at a party and instantly send them to your phone, or chart what you've eaten throughout the day. Orcam calls this an "augmented attention" experience -- it'll deliver helpful information throughout the day, and hopefully make your interactions more meaningful.

In many ways, MyMe seems reminiscent of Google Glass. The company believes it has some major privacy advantages, though. MyMe doesn't actually save any images or recordings, all of its work is done in the moment. And it's camera doesn't sit right on your face, which should make people less skittish about being surveilled. Still, it'll probably be awkward explaining why you're wearing a camera on your shirt. And it'll be even tougher to convince people that you're not actually recording them.

With MyMe, OrCam clearly built on its experience with its original wearable, a smart camera device that helps the visually impaired. Its co-founder, Amnon Shashua, is also the founder of Mobileye, a company that's made a huge business with in-car cameras. There's still plenty we don't know about MyMe, but we hope to learn more at CES next week.

Keeping kids away from questionable content while they surf the web is an ongoing battle, and there's a new site that's looking to help. Thinga, a kid-friendly search engine, offers answers to children's queries from the company's own content library, white-listed sites or privacy-minded search site DuckDuckGo. Thinga comes from a Yahoo Kids alum who worked on that kid-focused project before it shut down a while back. Those search results are vetted by the team at Thinga to make sure they're appropriate.

This site is meant for elementary school aged children and organizes content in sections like Video, Cool and Animals if a user isn't looking for something specific. What's more, the search engine is compliant with the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act and boasts parental controls, too. While it's web-only for now, Thinga is accessible on mobile and there are plans for native apps.

Google's Matias Duarte has a problem. In the next ten years he wants to replace the computer on your desk and the phone in your pocket with a smart, continuous mesh of information. But to do that, he's got to fundamentally change how everyone interacts with technology.

"I see what we're doing now in this digital interactive space as a kind of industrial revolution," Duarte, Google's vice president of design, tells WIRED. "But there's a real risk, there's a real risk of stagnation."

Computers of the future, Duarte says, will fade away into the background, creating a "mesh" that is more human and less disruptive to our lives.

"The system or the computer can become more accessible and more universal because it operates on atoms of interaction that are more human, that are conceptual, that are things that you could speak to or things that you could draw," he explains.

And the driving force behind the need for change? We're drowning.

"As we get more and more screens and more and more devices that are smart, both integrated into our homes but also on our bodies, it's creating new types of problems that are going to create a new type of opportunity."

Radically overhauling the design of our digital devices is no small task. Eight years on from the launch of the original iPhone we're still using rows of apps and touchscreen rectangles. And many of the design conventions our smartphones and tablets rely on are more than 30 y